Somebody's Baby
by grimmkittylove
Summary: AU ItaSaku. Sorta songfic-ish. 'He never got the chance to figure out whether he loved her or not.'


**Somebody's Baby**

-:-**  
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**Rating: **T- because… just because

**Genre: **Drama/General

**Pairing(s): **implied ItaSaku

**Word Count: **961

**AN**: This started as part of the 50 shinobi themes challenge, most specifically the 'sing me a song' prompt, but I decided to post it separately because I thought of something a bit better. I'm not sure how much I like this one, but I'll post it anyways.

Inspired by the song of the same name by Jon Foreman. He's just amazing. A lot of his stuff has Christian themes to it, but I'd still encourage you to take a listen if you're into low-key folksy-alternative stuff. I don't own him, for disclaimer's sake. I also used a line from a Hinder song in here... so I don't own that either. Or Naruto. All-hail Kishimoto-sama.

-:-

He wasn't sure why he visited her. She was not pretty; she was skinny, her eyes were a bit too far apart, her forehead took up a larger portion of her face than most, and her strange pink hair was always unkempt. She was foul-mouthed, had a strange sense of humor, was an angry drunk, and cried far too easily. She called the alley between his apartment complex and the 7-Eleven her home, but the truth was, she had none. She was a homely little homeless girl who always stank of alcohol and tobacco, and yet he kept coming back to check up on her.

When he pulled up to her corner, there were already a few empty beer cans strewn across the sidewalk. Narrowing his eyes, Uchiha Itachi slid out of the off-duty police cruiser and walked over to where the rail-thin girl was downing a couple of pills with her current can. She wasn't inebriated enough to miss his presence, but she was definitely well under the influence.

"You're drunk," he said bluntly. She glared up at him through red-rimmed eyes, a symptom of the drugs he was almost certain she'd bought off of a guy he'd helped arrest the day before.

She yelled, "If you were homeless, sure as hell you'd be drunk or high or trying to get there! You can't possibly understand what it's like to have nowhere to go! You've got Mommy and Daddy backing up your every move, and so many people who would be willing to take you in if they didn't! I don't. Nobody wants me. When nobody wants you, you get people throwing you money for beer or food or whatever, but they don't really care."

Her name was Sakura, but she went by Cherry or Pink. "Like the pop singer," she'd told him once, "except nowhere near as famous or pretty." It had been seven years, she said, since her parents had thrown her out on her ass with a drug problem and a split personality. Too much trouble, they'd said, and turned their backs on their only daughter. She still had nightmares of that night, she told him as she put back another can of the cheapest booze available in their town.

Itachi knew he should stop her and take her to a women's home or something, but she would never forgive him. So he just sat there and listened to her scream and cry and insult the world that had so badly wronged her. She described her dreams of heaven, a place with no fear, no anger, no pain. She described the lakes and rivers and fields of wildflowers with such flowing detail that it seemed to take her away from the hell she was in. If she had been given the chance, he decided she could have been a writer, a poet.

Sometimes she sang. She never completed a whole song, because she rarely heard more than a few snippets of one, but she had a way of making the seemingly random lyrics come together and form one never-ending melody that sent shivers up her listener's spine, shivers that had nothing to do with the cold. She could have been a singer as well, writing songs that painted such vivid pictures that they would move the listener to tears.

Every once in a while, she saved up enough money to buy a packet of finger brushes and scrubbed at her teeth. The stains never faded, but she claimed they made her feel a hell of a lot better when she was sober and could tell how nasty her mouth had gotten. He never questioned her. He rarely talked much anyways.

Her existence was a slap-in-the-face reminder of how well-off he was. Sometimes he would find himself bemoaning his responsibility and how controlling his family was, and he would think of her and become ashamed of himself. He never told her this, because she would simply laugh it off and drown herself again.

Still, he wondered if anyone else ever thought about her. She was somebody's baby girl, after all, even though they'd thrown her away. She was somebody's daughter, just looking for somebody to love her.

He never got the chance to figure out whether he loved her or not.

It was her birthday, a cold, bitter March day when he received the call. An anonymous caller who slurred their words so badly that he couldn't tell whether they were male or female told him about a half-drunk girl in baggy clothes that smelled of smoke who claimed she was going to jump off the Old Widow's Bluff within the hour. He was dispatched to the scene, but they arrived too late.

He recognized her at once, though he didn't say it. He was content to allow them to use dental records for identification, because admitting he knew her would simply make everything more complicated. Everything.

Today was her birthday, he knew. Her birth and death were exactly twenty-two years apart. Suddenly, he felt older than his twenty-six-almost-twenty-seven years. He was the only one who would remember this day, more likely than not. He would be the only one haunted by the look in her eyes the last time he saw her. He would be the only one to grieve, and it wouldn't even be in the open, because _he didn't know her_.

Uchiha Itachi walked out of the station that day looking no different. He acted no different. Anyone he knew would say he was no different. And for the most part, he wasn't. Still, there was something inside him, a harsh little voice haunting him til the day he died, because she was somebody's baby, and he could have saved her.


End file.
